Problems can occur within a telecommunications network that cause degradation and/or failure of communications sessions (e.g., voice calls). Session degradations/failures can be exhibited in data packet loss and/or packet queuing delay, which can result in an ability to establish a connection, a dropped session, or similar data communication d connection issues. Due to the complex network topologies of today's telecommunications networks, there can be a wide variety of root causes for a session degradation/failure. For example, a user equipment (UE) can be faulty (e.g., faulty hardware and/or software, such as a bug in a newly launched application), there can be poor radio coverage in a location of the UE, and/or a component(s) (or node(s)) of the telecommunications network can be faulty, to name only a few potential root causes of session degradations/failures. If remedial action is not taken to fix these issues, the telecommunications network can provide poor quality of service (QoS) and/or become inoperable for providing service to subscribing users.
In order to troubleshoot network issues, telecom operators have introduced monitoring tools that enable them to trace call failures at the various segments of the call path. For example, specialized monitoring tools and systems have been developed to monitor the Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) domain, the Circuit Switched (CS) domain, the Evolved Packet Core (EPS), the Radio Access Network (RAN), the air interface and the UE. A telecom operator may utilize any number of these tools, depending on the diversity of the network services. Also, depending on the size of the operator's service area, the operator may decide to have separate tools monitoring different geographical regions within the service area.
Localizing the root cause of a session failure using existing technology requires extensive manual interaction, and expertise, with multiple disparate tools and systems. In an illustrative example, a telecom operator may receive information that Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) calls are being dropped, perhaps along with general locations and/or times associated with the reported dropped calls. In order to troubleshoot the issue for a dropped call, a system expert, with proper access credentials, must login to, and collect call logs from, a first tool that monitors the IMS domain. This may be followed by a login to, and a collection of call logs from, a second tool that monitors the EPC and RAN. This may be followed by yet another login to, and a collection of call logs from, a third tool that monitors the air interface portion of the telecommunications network, as well as additional potential logins to other systems that monitor other portions of the network, such as a system that monitors the UE itself. On top of this, before troubleshooting the session failure, the system expert may also manually obtain data (e.g., an International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), device type of the UE, software version/build of the UE, radio frequency (RF) characteristics at the drop location, etc.) from other tools/data sources in order to provide needed context to the call logs collected by the aforementioned dedicated monitoring systems.
Needless to say, the use of multiple, disparate tools/systems to collect the data needed to troubleshoot a session failure is extremely time consuming. Even with respect to a single monitoring system that monitors a particular portion (e.g., the core network) of the telecommunications network, an expert user generally must wait for a significant period of time after issuing a log collection request until the call logs are finally collected and downloaded to the user's computer, which can be a lengthy process. When this is compounded across multiple disparate monitoring systems, as well as other data sources utilized for troubleshooting session failures, the end-to-end troubleshooting process becomes inordinately time consuming and complex from the user's standpoint. In addition, very few people have the expertise needed to access, and collect logs from, the multiple disparate tools/systems noted above. Often multiple experts are needed to collect session logs for a single session failure due to the multiple disparate tools/systems involved. Once call logs are finally collected, expertise is also needed to visually inspect and correlate the call logs obtained from various disparate monitoring systems in order to localize a root cause of a session failure. This dependency on scarce expertise is a significant limitation on many telecom operators who are tasked with troubleshooting a high number of session failures. Furthermore, with the regular introduction of new products, services, and capabilities, the demand for such troubleshooting is only increasing.